Trick Baby

by Iceberg Slim

  “That master plan is in the competent hands of the liberal white leaders. They are the indispensable agents of the white race. It is they with their mastery of base emotion, their sophisticated analysis of nigger psychology that permits them to project a merciful sympathetic image.

  “This is vital so that harassed, beleaguered nigger ministers and other black leaders can have such a source to which they can appeal. Pete, a four letter word is the key to the white master plan.

  “That word is hope. It means that what is desired is obtainable. The human organism when deprived of it, can become unpredictable, destructive, deadly. Pete, the liberals are aware that the great masses of niggers hope for escape from the ghettos.

  “They want to spill over into the mainstream of American life and pollute it with their criminality and lust for our women. They want to rub elbows with us all. They want to lose the consciousness of their blackness at the expense of our culture and privacy. They want to contaminate our Anglo-Saxon bloodline.

  “Pete, the fatal failing of the conservative is that he bluntly and stupidly strangles hope in the niggers. His rigid emotional structure won’t let him practice the subtle arts of deception and guile. These are essential adjuncts in our strategy to lull, to keep alive hope in the nigger without making his wild dreams of freedom realities. Do you buy what I’ve said so far, Pete?”

  I sat there thinking what a thrill it would be to cut their hearts out. The Goddess gushed happily. I wondered if Mr. Wherry would blow a pump artery if he suspected that he might have a nigger grandchild in Camille’s belly.

  The captain’s slitted stare had not left the smooth, charming face as he absorbed the grand lesson in hate.

  He licked his lips and blurted out, “No Brad, I can’t buy it! What about the countless nigras that you liberals have helped to escape from the ghettos through appointive positions in government and industry? You liberals put those white collars around their black necks, not the conservatives. You betrayed the white race and let the nigras invade our white society.”

  Mr. Wherry sighed and said, “Pete, you’re tragically misinformed. There are really two ghettos. One is physical, the other psychological. Now, it is true that we have selected certain niggers to wear white collars.

  “Almost all of them do make physical escapes from the ghetto, with our assistance, of course. Our motives are first to give dramatic, well-publicized reinforcement to our liberal image.

  “Secondly, those niggers whom we seem to liberate are precisely those types of niggers who possess rare intellect and academic polish. We have to remove them from the seething black masses.

  “If we didn’t they could conceivably give the mindless masses effective leadership against the white race. Now Pete, am I being too complex? Are you following me?”

  The captain probably at last realized that all of his own bombs were duds. Sweat had popped out on his freckled forehead. He stupidly waggled his head, yes.

  The Goddess quivered in joy beside me. I knew I couldn’t stand much more of it. Mr. Wherry sipped delicately at his champagne. He smiled impishly at me and his Whisty.

  I struggled against a wild impulse to punch Mr. Wherry in his girlish mouth. Then I gave Mr. Wherry a meager smile when I thought how lucky I was that my white face was letting me get secret, inside dope right from the haters’ mouths.

  He flicked a graceful hand through the Pump Room’s sacred air and said, “Pete, I’m gratified to be understood. Now, the diametric differences between the nigger world and the white world afford us the devices by which we neutralize and defang the white collar escapees from the ghettos.

  “The technique is roughly this. The freed nigger, elective and appointive as well, will face his entry into the white world with no little trepidation. His fears, his insecurity is born of the unfamiliar, unknown facets of the strange new world.

  “Underlying all of this, of course, is his well hidden, but nonetheless strong sense of inferiority. His is an urgent, practical need, perhaps unconscious, to conform to the mores, the protocol of the new world. He has a deathly dread of conspicuous violation of these codes.

  “His terror is that the whites who have sponsored him will take notice and hurl him back into the ghetto. He’s compelled to emulate white emotional control and polished, patient conduct.

  “We flatter him as he becomes more like us. His identity, his fiery racial resolutions, if he has any, fade and are eventually lost. If he fights the mold, we poke derisive fun at him, and make him appear ludicrous.

  “One can’t act like a nigger in suave white surroundings. We listen with compassion to his now guilt-ripened pleas for help for his black brothers back in the ghetto.

  “We throw him a few crumbs of appeasement. But soon he becomes an alien to his black brothers and they grow to hate him. They realize that he has sold them out. He becomes worthless to them and priceless to us.

  “He has lost his power to lead them, to hurt us. In his thinking and love for the creature comforts, except for his blackness, he becomes one of our troops. He helps us unknowingly to fight a brutal war against his own kind. You must forgive me, Pete, if I have been pedantic in my explanation. But I do have a deep personal involvement in affairs racial.”

  The Goddess said, “Daddy, you’ve never been more brilliant. I’ve got goose pimples. But what about girls like the one abused by that coon at the movie tonight? Shouldn’t we save them?”

  Mr. Wherry smiled sweetly. He scrutinized his polished nails for a moment.

  He looked blandly at her and said, “Whisty, precious, those girls are fecal matter, dregs, sediment settled at the bottom of the social barrel.

  “Historically and appropriately, the sexual peccadillos of the dregs are the petty province of conservatives, red necks, white trash and other hysterical slobs.

  “You typify the inviolate flower of white womanhood that by training and breeding would rather be dead than have sexual congress with a nigger. The niggers and the dregs will always be with us at the bottom of the barrel. So why court a coronary about it?”

  The Goddess bit her bottom lip and said, “You gentlemen must excuse me. I want to freshen up a bit.”

  We got to our feet as she rose from her seat and went toward the powder room. We sat down.

  The captain said, “Brad, that suppression plan for the nigras is incredible, if in practice. Are you sure that the whole concept is not merely a fanciful child of your fertile imagination?”

  Mr. Wherry smirked and replied, “Pete, you should change your politics and spend some time and money as I do with this country’s liberal politicians in mysterious smoke-filled rooms. Then perhaps you could become privy to some of the progressive political plums.”

  Then he beamed at me and said, “Well Johnny, the future defense of white America is going to be in the hands of young Anglo-Saxon troops like you. What is your reaction to our discussion?”

  I stood up and twisted as much contempt and disgust into my face as I could manage. I sucked up a gout of phlegm into my mouth. I leaned down quickly toward Mr. Wherry’s startled, immaculate face.

  I inhaled so deeply that bullets of pain shot through my gut muscles. I spat the filthy blob into his upturned face.

  He sat there stricken, paralyzed with shock, open-mouthed, staring up at me. The yellow-striped missile coasted down the bridge of his aristocratic nose.

  I glared down at him and pounded my fists against my thighs. I wanted him to rise up against me, so I could shred and pulp his face.

  The captain’s purple face was revolving from me to Mr. Wherry like perhaps a tennis buff’s at the Davis Cup playoffs.

  I turned and walked toward the door. The hook in the corner of my eye snared the Goddess returning from the powder room. She was coming quickly toward me. I stepped out to the sidewalk and took a big dose of crisp November air. For a moment I thought I’d checked my topcoat inside. Then I remembered that it was locked in the Jaguar.

  The Goddess rushed to the sidew
alk.

  She seized my arm and said, “Johnny O’Brien, are you drunk? What wrong’s with you? You’re deathly white. What happened? Why were you leaving without me?”

  I mumbled, “I needed fresh air. Let’s go to the car. And please don’t talk to me right now.”

  We walked silently to the parking lot and got into the Jaguar.

  I said, “Camille, take the outer drive to the lake front I want to get myself together before I talk to you.”

  19

  THE CONFESSION

  The Goddess was tight-faced when she parked near blustery Lake Michigan. We sat there for ten minutes and silently watched the foamy waves shatter against the dark shore. I was cold sober. But I couldn’t think of one sensible thing to say.

  Then I remembered that because of the movie hassle and all, I hadn’t asked her about her test for pregnancy.

  I said, “Did the test rabbit die?”

  She stared straight ahead and said, “I’ll answer your question after you answer my questions. Why were you leaving without me? And what happened when I went to the powder room?”

  I said, “I wish I hadn’t met your father. I’m sorry I found out how you got racial poisoning.”

  She said grimly, “Are you out of your alleged mind? You are the one who has been poisoned. You’re an unbelievably wretched coon-lover. Did you quarrel with Daddy? Answer me.”

  I felt my Irish-African blood boiling up inside me again.

  I said sharply, “I’ve got a mind all right. You can’t imagine how sharp I am upstairs. So has dear Daddy got a mind. But he’s got maggots for brains to believe that black people are going to grin and stay conned forever in their pigsties. I hope the day comes when your father crawls on his belly and begs to kiss a nigger’s black ass for his worthless life.”

  The lovely rose-tinted face stripped itself bare of color, beauty and its fictitious youth. The twisted, stark-white face of a stranger, a popeyed thing gritted its fangs and hurled itself toward me in the half darkness. It stared into my eyes evilly and silently.

  Then it chanted in a throaty whisper, “Mr. O’Brien, don’t you ever, ever, ever let any, any, any insult to Bradford Wherry reach my ears. I could kill you. You miserable coon-loving tramp, white trash. I was insane to let you touch me. I’m going to abort this little bastard inside me. My advice to you is to see a psychiatrist and get treatment and the reason behind your stupid mania for coons.

  “Never come in my direction again. Find a putrid coon girl and live unhappily ever after. Now, bum, I’ll take you to your car.”

  She ripped the ruby and platinum necklace I had given her from her throat and rammed it into my shirt pocket.

  She savagely twisted the key in the ignition. She thundered the engine and shot the Jaguar into screaming reverse.

  My head was in a spinning roar of anger and humiliation. I was silent until she stopped beside my Buick on Lake Street. I got out and slammed the door. I reached in and took my topcoat off the back seat.

  The Goddess was grim-faced, staring through the windshield. I stooped down and stuck my head into the sedan.

  I said slowly, “Mrs. Costain, I really shouldn’t hurt an elderly broad, but I’m going to deliver unto you one of your ineffably wonderful maims of the soul. You want to bet it won’t thrill you?”

  “I don’t have to go to a headshrinker to find out why I love Niggers. I got the sanest reason there ever was. Mrs. Costain, a Nigger has been fucking you in your ineffably white, Anglo-Saxon pussy for months now.

  “You’ve licked the coon like a lollipop. And you’ve loved every minute of it, haven’t you, Mrs. Costain? Mrs. Costain, you have a bona-fide bastard nigger baby in your sacrosanct guts.

  “My father is white. My mother is a coon. I can furnish proof if you think I’m a liar. I was born in Kansas City, Missouri on January fifteenth, Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-three in a nigger pigsty just a stone’s throw from Fourteenth and Vine Streets.

  “Check the records if you doubt it. I don’t want you to miss the full bang of the maim. But then, you don’t look thrilled at all, Mrs. Costain. What’s wrong? Have you lost your taste for screwy thrills?

  “You look like you just heard that dear old Daddy had croaked. Which reminds me. You might tell him that nigger Johnny O’Brien spat in his face in the Pump Room. Goodbye Mrs.—”

  I didn’t finish. I had seen her knuckles glowing whitely on the steering wheel. Her head had been shaking on her trembling shoulders like a broad with Parkinson’s disease.

  It should have warned me. She stomped on the accelerator. The Jaguar had hurtled forward and flung me to the street like a rag doll. I bounced and tumbled for fifteen feet.

  I was lucky Lake Street had no traffic at the late hour. I lay with the breath knocked out of me, and watched the Jaguar careen and weave at suicidal speed down Lake Street.

  I dragged myself to the Buick. My pain-stabbed body throbbed like one big awful toothache. I made it to the car seat. I sat there and patted and probed myself all over for broken bones.

  I looked in the mirror. My hair was matted with blood and the gritty soot and filth of Lake Street. I raised my head closer to the mirror to check the wound. It was just a half-inch gash in my scalp at the right side of my head.

  I drove down State Street, south to Forty-seventh Street. I drove into a filling station on Michigan Avenue and Forty-seventh. I got some gas and cleaned up as best I could.

  I pulled up in front of the Brass Rail Bar on Forty-seventh Street. Mr. Trick Bag was in there waiting to kick my ass. The sneaky bastard was going to win the war. But I didn’t give a damn.

  I got out of the car and hobbled across the sidewalk to the door. I stepped inside and sat in the booth near the front window. I told the waitress to bring me a fifth of Cutty Sark and a glass.

  Somehow I drove home after the bar closed. I woke up at dawn the next morning lying beside my bed with my clothes on.

  I stared at the rotating ceiling. I tried to move inside a straitjacket of pain. Clammy sweat spewed out of me. I sucked my cracked lips and with a grunt flipped over on my belly and raised myself on my elbows.

  I groped a hand out for the top of the nightstand for support to get to my feet. The uncertain hand raked a lamp off that crashed against the bottom of the bed’s headboard.

  I was panting on my hands and knees when I saw Blue’s bare feet on the carpet beside me. He helped me to the bed. I sat on the side of it. He leaned down close to me and frowned.

  He said, “Don’t tell me. I know what happened. That fabulous and mysterious broad you’ve been laying had a husband who caught you banging her and beat the crap out of you. Right?”

  I winced as he stooped and pulled off my shoe from my right foot. It felt like it was smashed.

  I said, “No, Blue, it wasn’t like that. I had an accident. The whole thing seems like a nightmare. But I guess it really happened.”

  He took off the other shoe and said, “Don’t waste your time in silly debate with yourself. It wasn’t a nightmare. Your right foot looks like a balloon. Did you wreck the Buick?”

  I groaned and said, “It wasn’t that kind of accident I mean I wasn’t in the Buick when it happened.”

  He said, “Folks, you’re like a son to me. I’ve been worried about you lately. You’re fidgety and you drag ass like a steel mill chump with—”

  I said crossly, “Blue, please save the lecture for some other time. I lost my woman last night. I blew her like a sucker.”

  He stood up and pulled my battered suit coat from my aching shoulders. He took it to the closet and hung it up. I lay back on the pillow and put my arm across my burning eyes to fend off the sharp fingers of morning light pointing into the bedroom.

  He sat on the side of the bed and said, “So, you get another broad even finer. You got looks, youth and a gift of gab. For you, broads are like streetcars. You miss one, it’s a cinch another will come along. You want to tell pappy what the hell happened?”

  I ran the wh
ole Goddess thing down to him from the Club Delisa, where we met, to the tumbling I did on Lake Street. I also told him why I never let him meet her.

  To that he said, “I’ve never met a peckerwood that could resist the Blue Howard charm when I turned it on. I don’t care how much that broad thought she hated niggers. She would have been crazy about me.

  “She and her father are pure poison for you now, since you blew your top like a mark. You should have stayed cool and figured some con with me to separate that Wherry sonuvabitch from a few grand. The worse hurt you can give an ego-crazy bastard like that is in the pocketbook.

  “You should have known that a screwy, top drawer white broad’s legs wouldn’t open forever for you. She had to wake up down the line that you were a nigger grifter. A broad like her who has flashed her pussy all over the world is fatal to a young fellow like you.

  “One of those glorious international pussies could even con you that you’d die without it. You’re lucky you blew her before you got the stupid idea that you were in love.

  “Stick to young dumb broads that you can bang with no risk to the heart. Take it easy and rest for a few days. Hell, we won’t starve if we miss playing the con for a while. Let’s get those clothes off. I’ll give you a good liniment rubdown and fix you a nice hot toddy. I’ll lay you odds that in a week you won’t remember what that broad looked like.”

  Blue left the house at noon. My body felt better after the rubdown and hot bath. The hot lemonade heavily spiked with scotch made me drowsy. But I couldn’t go to sleep.

  I couldn’t get the Goddess off my mind. I kept hitting the fifth of Scotch that Blue had left on the nightstand. One thought kept pumping tension into my chest until I felt like I’d explode.

  Why had I let the dialogue between Brad and Pete trick me, upset me, and set me up to expose myself to the Goddess like a chump? Why did I have to confess to her that I was a nigger? Why had I spat in Mr. Wherry’s face? Why did I let those cruel words escape my sucker mouth on Lake Street?